


Sleep

by mostlyanything19 (halfanapple)



Category: Broadchurch
Genre: Gen, Hugs, Hurt/Comfort, Nightmares, Sharing a Bed, can very much be read as pre-relationship, s02e04
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-22
Updated: 2019-09-22
Packaged: 2020-10-26 07:36:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,520
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20738603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halfanapple/pseuds/mostlyanything19
Summary: Ellie can't sleep, Hardy can't help the nightmares, and maybe they can both use a hug.(Set mid-s02e04, naturally, because when there's only one bed, you write fic about it.)





	Sleep

**Author's Note:**

> How to write successfully: Watch your chosen media happily establish that character A has terrible nightmares, reinforce this at the start of _that very episode_, throw him into the most outrageously tropey 'oops-there's-only-one-bed' scenario with character B, and then _**have absolutely nothing happen**_  
aka, "Al_right,_ I'm gonna DO IT MY DAMN SELF THEN."

„Go to sleep, Miller,” he says, and turns away onto his side, tiny tugs on the covers he’s lying on and she under, from where his shoulder and elbow dip into the mattress, until he’s lying still.

Ellie contemplates saying something else, just to be contrary –_ is that a yes; what’re you doing sleeping it your suit; _ perhaps just _ goodnight_. In the end she doesn’t, but sleep doesn’t come easy, either. It hasn’t for months, and so it’s not worse tonight, the lying-awake, just different.

She hasn’t slept next to another person in … well. The same amount of months as she’s been barely sleeping at all. And only ever one person, before that, for so, so many years.

This hotel room is nothing like her bedroom at – where she used to live, and Hardy is as different from Joe as two men can be from each other. He looks different, he moves different, he speaks and acts and thinks different, he even sleeps different, there, next to her. Very silent; very still; very turned away. Joe used to sprawl, used to shift a lot and get cuddly in his sleep, and –

well, anyway. It’s nothing alike.

And yet, here they are: she on the left, he on the right. That is familiar, that feels normal, someone sleeping on her right. It shouldn’t, but it does. It’s just instinct. The sheets smell different from her sheets at home and Hardy smells different from Joe – she knows that, not from right now, but she knows it, somehow, what he smells like – but he’s a person and he’s sleeping next to her now, and that is … 

She breathes it in, and breathes it out, lies with it there in the dark and tries to determine what it is. Strange, and strangely normal, and not bad, just …

Maybe it’s not that important.

Hardy’s breath is slow and even, and barely audible at all. It didn’t change when he dropped off from a doze into proper sleep, or just barely; if it hadn’t been one and a half hours without him moving a muscle she would be wondering if he wasn’t lying just as awake as she is.

As it is, she becomes aware that she is lying in the dark in a hotel room, listening to her ex-boss sleep and finding it, despite what she said to him earlier, more soothing than weird. Joe's defence would have a field day.

Usually Ellie gets up when she really can’t sleep. It’s worse lying idle in bed, thinking about the train wreck her life has become, her thoughts churning round and getting more gloomy with every turn. But she doesn’t know how light of a sleeper Hardy is, and she doesn’t want to wake him – one of them should get their beauty rest, and she knows sleep is a scarce commodity for him, as well. He’s said as much, and even if he hadn’t, the perpetual dark shadows under his eyes would tell the story for him.

Ellie turns onto her side, sighing, settling in for the long run. Now she’s a woman lying in a hotel room in the dark _ watching _ her ex-boss sleep... but only theoretically. It’s _ too _ dark to do any watching; he’s only a shape in front of the window’s street-light shine, only a dip in the too-soft mattress, only a faintly whistling breath; someone living, someone _ being_, on her right.

Slowly, almost without her notice, Ellie’s eyes slip shut. Her breathing evens out.

They sleep.

For half an hour.

She doesn’t know where she is at first, when she’s rudely jostled awake. Ellie has woken up from plenty of nightmares lately, but they’re only ever her own. It’s her rearing up chilly with sweat in tangled sheets, it’s her coming awake gasping, or calling out, or in a godawful silence that only dissipates into hollow, sobbing breaths when she remembers she’s the only one there to fill it.

It’s disorienting to have it happen in a different place, with a different person doing the dreaming.

Hardy doesn’t sound like he’s having a nightmare. He sounds like he’s dying. Ellie flings her hand out towards the light switch as soon as she’s got enough sense to do it and fumbles with the unfamiliar bedside lamp, her heart in her throat, until the blasted thing finally deigns to cooperate. 

The light is dim, and he’s on his back, thrashing and twitching (enough so, clearly, to swat her in the side and wake her up), his customary daytime scowl replaced by something deeper; distorted and ugly. He’s not breathing right anymore.

Ellie reaches out immediately, wants to shake him awake if only just to be sure that he _will _wake up and this isn’t something more dangerous than night terrors – but she doesn’t even have to do any shaking. Hardy surges up at the first touch of her hand to his chest, flinging it off him with the force of the half-unconscious, and he’s coughing like his life depends on it, heaving in great, greedy, painful-sounding gulps of air that start out desperate and veer off into outright panicked in a matter of moments. He’s fumbling for the blanket – no – for his trouser pockets, grabs out the crinkling packet of his pills, thank fuck, because she wouldn’t have known where he keeps them, shakes two into his palm and swallows them dry.

Then, gasping, he collapses back onto his pillow, his eyes wide, and wet, and disoriented. It’s clear that all this just now happened on complete autopilot. He’s barely even properly awake.

Ellie leans in, cautiously, trying to catch his eye. “Hey,” she says, “hey, hey, you’re okay. Are you okay?”

She doesn’t think he’s aware of it, but somehow his fingers have caught the cuff of her sleep shirt and tangled there, and Ellie lets him have it in exchange for pressing her other hand to the junction of his shoulder and neck; something like reassurance, she hopes. His pulse is hammering, occasionally stuttering, against the side of her thumb.

Hardy’s bleary gaze swerves over her. His brows knott together. “Miller-?” he croaks.

“Yeah,” she nods. “Yeah, we drove to Sandbrook, remember? Taxi service.”

Something like recognition settles in his eyes then. He glances around the room and it settles even further, and the half-frantic confusion becomes something much, much more familiar to her from nights exactly like this: That brittle, hopeless begging from every dog-tired bone of you for one night without having to wake up like this, for all of it to just… just _stop_. It sweeps, uncontrolled, over his entire face, and Ellie has to sit up and look away.

“Just to clarify, this is what you mean when you say you don’t sleep, right?” There’s something dark-ish huddling in the framed painting on the wall next to the door. Some sort of animal; the light’s too dim to see. “I don’t have to call you an ambulance.”

“No,” he sighs on an exhale, eyes closed. “No, you don't.” Then he rolls to the side and sits up with a grunt. “I have to –” He waves his hand. She lets him go.

He returns from the bathroom after some minutes of splashing water noise and silence, in a thin grey t-shirt that looks as if it might be what he normally sleeps in, and the same pair of trousers as before. Dumping the discarded dress shirt on the back of a chair, he staggers back around, wiping a tired hand over his scraggly cheek.

Ellie reaches over and pulls back the covers on his side of the bed. “Come on then.”

Hardy frowns at her, hesitant. “You said top of the covers.”

“And now I’m saying under the covers. You’ll freeze in just that t-shirt; the last thing I need tomorrow is DI Hardy on a case with a cold.” God knows what _that_ would be like – the grumpiness might break world records, and he already looks pathetic enough as it is; shaken and pale under his tousled hair and beard, and visibly unsteady on his feet. Vulnerable, too, in just that one thin layer, with that open, defenceless look in his eyes. It squeezes at her heart, and she doesn’t even have the motivation to scold herself for it. No sense in belabouring the obvious: she cares about Alec Hardy a whole lot more than she ever thought she would back when he stole her job; she’s been through this with herself, and now she’s bloody well going to stick with it. “Go on, you’re still wearing half your suit, don’t make a thing out of it.”

For once, he does as she says, slipping under the covers with the evasive sideways glance of a man who knows he’s being comforted and wishes he weren’t actually in the position to need it. They both shift around a bit, and lapse back into silence.

“Should we leave the light on for a bit?” It’s what she does, after. Reads; stares at the ceiling.

Hardy just scoffs. “No, Miller.”

Ellie turns the light off and lies back down next to him. It’s not weird this time, not in the funny sense of the word. His breath is still stuffy, too fast. Nothing like before. Glancing over, she can make out his hands clasped tight together on top of the covers, mirroring her own.

“You wanna talk about it?” she offers quietly, thinking she can guess the answer, and rightly enough:

“No.”

Even the tame bit of bite from just before has gone out of his voice now, washed soft with defeat and exhaustion: It’s not a _ fuck off, _ it’s just a _ not this_. She wonders how he spends these nights normally. If he just lies there as he does now, in the dark, radiating misery; the abating, base animal fear of a body thrown far too sudden into emergency mode and trying to clamber its way back out of it.

Probably.

“You want a hug?”

Hardy is quiet.

Ellie shifts, turning to face him. Waits. He isn’t facing her, is studiously looking towards the window. She can see his throat working in the shimmer of light, and puts a gentle hand on his arm. “I’m gonna, if you don’t say anything.”

Hardy doesn’t say anything.

Ellie hugs him.

They’re an awkward fit to say the least. But, tough – they’re all they’ve got right now, and there’s no-one else here to judge or do it better. He turns into her arms when she tugs at him, carefully, and doesn’t hug her back exactly, just curls up there without a word or a sound and definitely without a look.

She holds him. He feels different from Joe, too, it turns out: thinner, and narrower in the shoulders, and she isn’t used to the silky shift of hair against her cheek when she rests her head against his.

“It feels like drowning," he murmurs, unexpected, and muffled against her shoulder. “Every night. I go to sleep and I wake up and I don’t know how to breathe.”

_ It was deeper than I thought, _ it echoes in her head; the lead weight of all he’d told her earlier in the car still heavy in her stomach. _ I got pulled under... _

_ Water rots the body. The weight of her. _

_ What sort of a person leaves a child like that? _

Impulsively, Ellie gathers him closer. She realizes that she can feel his heart beating faintly against his ribs, through his back. Still fast, she thinks, and harder than her own, but not erratic. Just like any other heart. “You’re not drowning, Alec,” she tells him, eyes closed tight.

“Oh, tha’s great to know, _thanks_,” he retorts, the sarcasm softened but evident enough, and she almost laughs despite herself. Fair. Forget former detectives, they’re their very own fucking-useless-words-of-comfort-club, too, the two of them.

“You’re welcome,” she snips back anyway, and if it doesn’t help with the memories and metaphors of nightmares, not with the what-ifs and what-might-bes of that Damocles sword of his, dangling above a possibly very literal deadline, then it helps with the reality of this: the ground feels steadier around them, and this previously unfamiliar territory not quite so unfamiliar anymore. She sighs and rubs his back. “I get them too, you know. Just … lately. With all that’s happened.”

For the first time since she's pulled him into it, Hardy stirs in her embrace, just enough to tug his hand from in-between them. His arm comes round her side and hugs her back.

He doesn’t say, _you don’t have to wonder every time if this is the one that kicks off an episode and literally kills you, though,_ whether that’s out of kindness or for the same reasons he never speaks of it at all_. _He says, “I thought you probably did, yes,” and then: “They’ll go away. Just give it time,” and it’s such a stupidly sweet thing to say, given the situation they’re in and how obviously bullshit it is, looking at him, that she has to blink away the sudden hot sting of tears burning her eyes.

“God, you’re full of _shit,”_ she exclaims, voice a little rough, his hair tickling her nose.

They’ve been hugging quite a bit longer now than what convention says two friendly ex-colleagues who are definitely not having an affair whatsoever should be hugging, but she makes no move to let go yet, and he huffs a heavy breath into her collar and sags a bit deeper into it. “Sorry.”

“’S okay,” Ellie says. “You can’t help it.”

When they do pull apart, it’s not even awkward. That’s the most surprising thing about it. She’s always thought, for sure, that hugging Alec Hardy must be one of the more awkward things in the world. He's looking right at her, though, tired but clear-eyed, and she's looking back and somehow it’s not.

“Do something about this, will you,” Ellie says softly, giving his chest a gentle press with the palm of her hand, right over his heart. It’s a step too far maybe, but there’s nobody else who will tell him and what if it’s something he needs to hear?

Hardy looks away and sighs begrudgingly, just the slightest inclination of his head in acknowledgement that he’s heard what she said, and that is that. They untangle the rest of the way and move apart, each back into their own space.

Somehow, though, their own spaces have moved a lot closer since the beginning of the night. It’s more the general middle now. 

Ellie blinks slowly up at the ceiling and, despite everything, she thinks she could go to sleep now. There’s somebody there next to her, warm and quiet and not so turned away anymore, and it’s not Joe, is not like anything she’s used to, but she can’t even joke that it’s weird because it’s just not. It’s nice. It’s close. Companionable. 

Hardy nudges her hand with his.

“Miller,” he says, and then there’s a pause. “Thanks.”

She nudges him softly back.

“Go to sleep, Hardy,” she tells him, and then, after all: “Good night.”


End file.
